"Larry," Yuth yelled, "you—"
But there was no time.
Karl trumpeted and bellowed, trying to say, "Run".
Yuth clung tightly to Larry's body as the janitor wrapped himself protectively around her.
Three silver-eyed wyrms burst through the hole they'd opened up in the garage's chilling. Slabs of tile and concrete fell from the ceiling like boulders, crushing cars left and right. Karl watched in frightened awe as Larry summoned a magic barrier around himself and Nurse Costran, blocking the falling debris.
Fungal creatures streamed in from the ramps, both from the lower levels and the Garden Court above.
Ichigo, Bever, Karl thought-said, help!
He gave them all the power they needed, and found that somehow, he still had more left to give. Karl's entire body was overflowing with stamina, as if it was being pumped into him from out of nowhere.
But the three silver-eyes were just too strong.
Through sheer force of their powers, the enemy caught Karl's spirits by the threads of their weapons' plexuses and slammed the ghosts against the walls. Karl slithered over to help them, while Dr. Rathpalla and several others engaged the new threat—and failed.
The wyrms crushed their bodies against the ground with insurmountable force. Sheets of magic glistened in Karl's eyes as they pressed down on him and pinned him to the floor.
Tendrils grew out from their hands and crawled over his body and dug in, initiating a link. The fungus' monsters rushed in all around them, and leapt, as if to force-feed them all.
And then, all at once, everything stopped. On the ground and in the air, the silver-eyed wyrms turned motionless. The fungus creatures were frozen, too—a garden of vile sculptures.
Karl pulled himself free with scrapes of his claws against the ruined tile floor. He slithered over to Larry and Nurse Costran. Ichigo and Bever floated toward him.
Dr. Rathpalla and everyone else pulled away from their attackers.
Karl was far from the only one to clench his claws and stare, blinking with disbelief.
He hadn't slowed his perception of time. He could still move.
All of a sudden, the motionless fungal creatures just… came apart. Their muscles and tissues frayed into spindly fibers. Limbs came sloughed onto the ground. The collapse rippled across the scene as everything broke up into piles of unmoving refuse.
Dr. Rathpalla scuttled back in shock.
It was only then that Karl realized he couldn't hear the fighting anymore. Some engines thrummed up at the surface, but the sounds of gunfire had all petered out, and were quickly replaced by expressions of surprise, both human and wyrm, and Karl realized he could understand them both.
The next thing he knew, every silver eye in sight turned gold.
"Karl, what's going on?" Bever asked.
"I…" Karl turned to Dr. Rathpalla. "Dr. Rathpalla?"
The wyrm that had pinned Karl down looked around in shock. "What happened?" it sang.
It was one of the transformees from the garage.
In fact…
"Your allies have returned to their senses," Bever said.
"Then so have our enemies," Ichigo said, picking his swords off the ground.
One of the attackers—the wyrm in the dove robe—shook his head. Then, he reared up tall, pointed at Dr. Rathpalla, and snarled. "You! What did you do to us?"
Energies swirled around his raised hand.
"Bring us the Sorcerer, now!"
"Not a chance," the psychiatrist replied.
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Ichigo squatted down, about to leap and attack, when Bever grabbed him by the hand.
"Stop," the axeman said. "Look."
The dove robe transformee's hand began to quiver. The transformee turned to it, only to stagger back in horror.
He was… changing.
"Wh-what's happening to meeeeerrrrghgh—"
His neck and limbs stretched long with a twist and a crunch. Fungal masses erupted from him, above and below. Branches furcated off the masses, tearing through his robes. Like spreading roots, growths splintered off his tail and sunk into the ground, breaking up tile and concrete.
And he wasn't the only one.
All around, against their desperate flailing, and their screams and roars, all of the transformees that had come to attack the hospital began to change, as did all of the silver-eyed wyrms that had joined the battle midway through.
It made no difference whether the transformees were grounded or high in the air, roots spiraled down from them, all the same twining around in stalks that pierced the earth like the rest. The serpents' bodies creaked and bulged, twisting and coiling as they grew and grew. Their heads deformed; the tips of their branches swelled. Limbs and necks distended and split, spreading like boughs as they reached up toward the ceiling, the sky, and the dawn.
Nurse Costran clutched a claw at her chest. "It's Genneth and Andalon," she said. "It has to be…"
— — —
For a moment, as I opened my eyes—back in my body once more—I thought time was still paused. Letty loomed over me, utterly motionless. But, no, time was ticking along normally. It moved through Ani as she stood on the ground, staring at me from behind the spherical forcefield's protection. Smoke flowed around the barrier and over the fizzing spore pits
Even with my wyrmsight thickened everywhere to the max, I couldn't see any trace of Letty's powers. Her attacks had just vanished. The same would have been true of the blue, spectral flames, had they disappeared, but they hadn't.
They'd moved.
Andalon floated with her back turned to me, swathed in aura and cerulean fire. She was looking up at Letty.
I did too.
That's when I realized that Letty wasn't entirely frozen. Her eyes were still moving. They flashed hateful glares in between their disbelieving blinks.
Holy fudge, Letty was staring at Andalon. And then, Andalon spoke to her.
"What does wyrmeh have to say?"
With those words, Letty's paralysis ceased. Ms. Kathaldri responded with a snort of spiteful wyrmsong. Somehow, I heard Letty's voice itself over that sound. Her words were distant and distorted, but they were there, and were hers, and they were dark and filled with fire.
Holding her claws up, Letty stared at her body in shock. She howled. "What have you done to me!? I'm a divine beast! I should be beautiful! My mane is fire and my claws are ivory. My scales are jewels that gleam in the dark!"
Spores wafted down from her snout.
Andalon shook her head. "No, Letty, you don't look like that."
"You're telling me I—I look like this?" She glanced down at Cassius and Bethany's severed heads and then recoiled in disgust.
"No… no! Verune! He—he—"
Again, Andalon shook her head. "—Mr. RuRu is being weird."
"Shut the fuck up!" Letty swiped her claw at Andalon, but it phased through without effect. "You're lying! Who are you! Why are you here?!"
Meanwhile, down on the ground, Ani was watching this with what I could only assume was a mix of terror, bemusement, and quizzical exhumations. She'd sat down on the bottom of the force-sphere, totally gobsmacked.
Andalon's flames flared. "Nuh-uh. It's the truth."
Suddenly, with a shriek and stabbing claw, Letty reared back, shook her head and roared.
"No! I remember! It's you! You! You're the one from my dreams!You! You ghost! You demon! You did this to me! You woke me up! You and those fucking doctors! They should have let me die, but they didn't! They made a fetish out of me, and then you came and woke me up! It's your fault! It's your fault! You dumped me in this crapsack world! I could have died a beauty, but you, you made me ugly!"
She raised her claw, ready to strike, and slash, and tear.
"I'll fucking kill you!"
Absolutely massive plexuses gleamed into being around Letty's claws, as if she was about to tear down the sky. She charged—but then Andalon stuck out her palm, and, in an instant, Letty froze.
"Bad wyrmeh!" Andalon yelled. "Bad Letty!"
Her golden eyes twitched, narrowed, and rolled in an unending silent scream.
I slithered forward to get a view of Andalon's face. She'd lowered her head in disappointment.
"You finally sing, wyrmeh," she said. "I get to hear you for the first time, and what do I hear? Bad things! You're killing! You're breakening everything!"
"Time-in for a time-out," Andalon said.
I blinked.
What?
That… that was Dana said whenever she'd given me a time out. Why was Andalon quoting my sister?
Letty's body began to twitch.
"Out-time is whenever you're ready to be nice again."
For a rage-filled moment, Letty broke free of her unseen restraints. But then she went rigid, as if something inside her had crystallized.
And then, something began to happen.
It started with her tail. Things I could only call veins crawled down off her body and broke through the ground below, plunging through spore pools and the factory floor alike. Steam frothed and hissed off the ground.
And Letty began to sink—and she took Cassius and Bethany with her. The two wyrms disappeared into the protuberances swelling into being all across the upper half of Letty's body. Her claws spasmed and fused, surging with growth, along with her arms. They branched and broke, thickening and lengthening until Letty's was a bouquet of necks whose tips then blossomed into single wyrm-heads, and each and every one of them was hers.
Like something out of a myth, the wyrm—once, a woman; once, young—was now a tree, a leafless tree with fungal hide bark and branches that ended in six-eyed heads that shivered in the wind, wafting spores that glistened like falling snow in the ruin she had wrought.
"Mr. Genneth!"
Andalon turned to face me, with a smile on her face. "I rem—"
—She flickered like an interrupted signal, and then sputtered and disappeared.
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